Literature

Kemang Wa Lehulere (2015) Kemang Wa Lehulere, Cape Town: Stevenson, illustrated on page 224 and 225.

Exhibited

Stevenson, Cape Town, To whom it may concern, 22 January to 28 February 2015.

Notes

Drawing is integral to Kemang Wa Lehulere’s shape-shifting artistic output. The artist’s formal training in visual arts at the Community Arts Project (2004-2005) included tuition in drawing. After co-founding the artist-led collective Gugulective, in 2006, he pushed drawing aside in favour of conceptual initiatives that drew strongly on text, performance and installation. He nonetheless occasionally exhibited drawings. In 2010, he won the MTN New Contemporaries Award with a large wall drawing produced with white chalk. “It was a logical transition from my text-based work to the wall drawings, from alphabetic text to imagery,” said the artist.¹ He continued to produce ephemeral wall drawings for important exhibitions in Berlin, Chicago, New York and Paris throughout the 2010s.

Initially reticent about publicly showing his works on paper, Wa Lehulere has over time built up a large body of works in the medium, mainly produced in ink.² His earlier works tended to be cartoonish, incorporating recurring motifs such as cocooned figures, combs and pencil erasers, but since 2012 his drawings have become increasingly gestural, calligraphic and abstract. The present lot is an important example of the latter style and connects to an encounter, in Paris, with the work of Japanese artist Chieko Shiomi.

In 1962 Shiomi began to author textual pieces that she called action poems. Started in 1965, her Spatial Poems are each framed by an invitation sent to friends and colleagues to respond to a simple instruction. Wa Lehulere’s 2015 exhibition in Cape Town, where this work was exhibited, took its cue from Shiomi’s Spatial Poem No 3 (Falling Event) to explore the death in exile of writer Nat Nakasa, who committed suicide in 1965 by leaping from a building in New York. The vertical bands of black rehearse the falling event but also present as stark memorials to a writer who was targeted with a five-year banning order by the apartheid government. Four other ink drawings from this exhibition were acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago.

The more recent drawings lot 229 and 230 are linked to a 2018 exhibition in London. Building on a multi-element piece commissioned by Performa, the performance art biennial, and premiered in New York in 2017. His new drawings further visualised aspects of his interest in astronomy, in particular the millennia-old ways of understanding the stars and moon cycles in Egypt and Mali. This research opened up a new line of historical enquiry for the artist. “I am interested in how history lives in the present,” said Lehulere. “While something is historical it is not necessarily something that belongs to the past.”³ The style of these drawings slots into a line of assured pattern making, a hallmark of his work, whether working with figures or not.

^1. Sean O’Toole (2013) Interview with artist, in My Joburg, Paris, La maison rouge, page 128.

^2. Kathryn Smith (2012) Interview with artist, in Some Deleted Scenes Too, Cape Town, Stevenson, pages 54 to 55.

^3. Britta Färber (2017) Interview with artist, in Bird Song, Munich, Hatje Cantz.